


Escape Velocity

by Dulcidyne



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: 707 Route Spoilers, Afterending spoilers, Angst, Dissociation, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Red String of Fate, Schrodinger’s Saeyoung
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 21:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9677957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dulcidyne/pseuds/Dulcidyne
Summary: Whatever tethered him to her world has already snapped and now he’s just drifting and disconnected, ephemeral and insubstantial, there and not there all at once--Schrodinger’s Saeyoung.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to White Rabbits and Wormholes.

A slice of city skyline slips through the blinds, striping diffuse streetlight glow across the face of a boy just emerging into consciousness. It’s the first thing he sees when his eyelid flutters open--the amber flare of sodium vapor in blue dim--and he winces when the brightness drives a cold scalpel-edge of pain directly into his optic nerve.

“Oh--” another voice says, half swallowed by his reflexive hiss, but distinctively feminine. By the bed, an ECG readout shows the stuttering thump of his heart with a jagged green spike. Despite the pain and the worried chirp of the machines hooked into him, he has to bite back his laugh. It lingers in his mouth like a morphine lollipop, giddy and sweet enough to make his head spin. She never ever listens.

“You’re still here? I’m starting to think you really do just like that chair,” he chides.

But when he opens his eyes again, the concerned face that comes into view stops the rest of his lecture short. It’s not meant for her and he’s not sure if he’s relieved or dejected. Happiness evaporates off his tongue.

“Luc...Saeyoung. It’s--well, I’m sure I’m not who you expected to see...”

Jaehee tucks mussed hair back behind her ears but the effort does little to restore her back to factory standard. She’s as human as he’s ever seen her with her wrinkled dress shirt and her finger-combed hair sticking out in wild wisps. He spots her suit jacket discarded over the back of the chair like an afterthought. On anyone else, disheveled at this hour is nothing extraordinary. But Jaehee doesn’t spend her nights with her nose in a bottle of soju, hand wrapped around a noraebang mic. She doesn’t stumble home after shouting her goodbyes across the street to her coworkers, tottering heels tapping off-tempo staccato onto the pavement. On Jae Hee, disheveled is fundamentally wrong. A negative where a positive should be. An antiparticle. Anti-Jaehee.

The machine beeps come faster and louder. Any second now, this crumpled, grief-smudged doppelganger is going to collide on a molecule of sensible, unflappable Jaehee reality and annihilate everything.

Hospital air, reeking of antiseptic and IV drip, barrels into the room with a rush of dimmed fluorescent light from the hall and he looks up to see Jumin take a pause, hand still on the door handle.

“You’re awake then.”

He offers a perfunctory nod and enters the room without another word. In one hand, there’s a styrofoam cup with a cloud of steam condensing off the top but he makes no move to drink it, set it down, or pass it to his exhausted assistant. Styrofoam. Nothing Jumin owns is designed to be disposable. Not his diamond-inlaid pens, not his porcelain dinner plates, not his silver-plated dress collar stays. His world exists outside of plastic shrink-wrapped convenience. In a corporate heir’s world, things gleam and glow forever.

It’s like a game in a kid’s magazine--the half educational, half distraction ones they stock in the hospital waiting rooms. Circle the thing that doesn’t belong: tailored three-piece Ermani suit, Verragamo tie, sterling silver tie pin, and one disposable cup. If Saeyoung had a pen (just a regular, chewed-up Bik), he’d circle the air around the cup over and over, pressing harder and harder until the cheap nib tore through the page.

“Did you bring that for me?” Saeyoung settles back into the pillows and directs the question up at the ceiling in wonderment that he only has to partially feign. “Oh my, Mr. Chairman-to-be’s tender, caregiving side...”

The cup still niggles at the corner of his eye like a jittering artifact spliced into reality through clumsy video editing. He grins a 707 grin as if nothing in the world can ever bother him and sits up to look at Jumin.

“Oh! Is this what it feels like to be Elly?”

He preens as best he can with one arm hooked to IVs and machines and the other wrapped in layers of gauze. Tubing clatters. He pays it no mind. “Nya~ong. But Mr. Caregiver, do you mind switching out whatever that is for a-”

“It’s not for you.” Jumin interrupts, lips compressed down as if he’d like to say more but thinks better of it.

“Saeyoung, you’re feeling better then...” Jaehee says before her eyes meet Jumin’s across the room. A whole conversation scrolls in the empty space between them. They don’t have to take out their phones and type it up in the RFA messenger for him to know that it’s about him. And. That. It’s. Serious.

Saeyoung taps the pulse oximeter clipped to his index finger against the bed rail as if it were a mouse button and a steady, reassuring clicks fill in the gaps between the machine beeps.

“I am. Nearly 100% better. Maybe 99.00001% better. All I need for that last .99999% is a Ph.D Pepper, and some Honey Buddha Chips,” he counts each off with a tap of his fingertip, “and a Miss Cutie body pillow and matching limited edition collector’s blanket, a Zet Box and a Grey station for when I get frustrated with the Zet Box and a widescreen TV. I think then, I’d feel totally, completely, 100% better.”

His eyes sweep the room until he spots the red of his phone case on the nightstand. Should he call her and see if she got to the apartment safely? Or...would he just be interrupting the first real night of sleep she’s had in days? A restless ache catches him in the ribs. All his nagging for her to go rest at home and the second he wakes up to find someone else in her chair, the whole universe feels off-kilter.

“You…” Jaehee starts then stops, concern in every weary line around her eyes and a frown that says this is hardly the time for jokes. “You do remember, don’t you? What we told you before...”

She’s so serious. He laughs. “Why are you looking like that? Is this a drama?”

Saeyoung pauses for effect, taking a moment to compose his expression into something more drama-worthy--with little success, he keeps laughing despite himself. “Do I…have amnesia? Have I swapped bodies? Am I actually an alien from another planet and the doctors are keeping me for testing? Do I have cancer?”

Anti-Jaehee does a spot-on impression of regular Jaehee exasperation for anything nonsensical. Jumin holds the cup that isn’t for anyone in the room and does a spot-on impression of a man in the middle of a board meeting.

Unlike Jaehee, hospital despair hasn’t left a single visible mark on Jumin. If anything, he’s too Jumin...too business as usual. It’s as if something has distilled him down into a condensed cocktail of emotional detachment, wealth, and cat obsession and poured him back into his suit. But the focused intensity of him is hyperrealistic to the point of artificial.

“You don’t have amnesia or any of those other things,” Jumin says. “But, clearly, you are in denial.”

Matter-of-fact words clipped into precise syllables. They drop to the linoleum like a tray of needles, their metal points ricocheting.  
  
“Haha, alright. Disappointing choice, given the alternatives.” His pulse oximeter taps louder and faster and his smile is starting to hurt his cheeks so he lets it fall while he glances back at the phone. Softly, he asks, “What were the writers thinking with this script?”

“You’re being tiresome,” Jumin informs him, his free fingertips pressed against his temple. “I have a headache and there was no wine in the hospital cafeteria due to some strange oversight. I intend to inquire--”

Anti-Jaehee cuts to the point. “V’s death is a shock to all of us. I know you weren’t on the best of terms in the end but that doesn’t...it doesn’t erase years of friendship. You don’t seem to be taking the news seriously...to be making jokes right now--”

_V’s death._

His head is shaking, a bubble of suppressed laughter expanding in his lungs. V’s death--that’s just...impossible. Ridiculous. It’s worse than the wrinkled shirt and the styrofoam cup and the wrong person in the chair by the bed. He really should’ve caught on earlier. It’s not like him to be so slow on the uptake. Some genius he is. The bubble in his chest pops against his sternum with one long, shuddering exhale that warps his laughter until it sounds breathy and helpless. V’s death. Anti-Jaehee. The cup. The chair.

He woke up on the wrong side of the multiverse somehow, traveled through planes of spacetime in a wormhole wink to wake up in a universe where he doesn’t belong; a universe where everything is comically, disastrously _wrong._

A shiver in his chest maps cold in his veins like contrast dye and numb follows. It isn’t the _‘count backward from 10’_ and wake up to find the girl he loves asleep in the chair beside his bed, her hands wrapped around his kind of numb . This numb is frostbite and flash freeze, it’s the cold and shadowed gaps of space where starlight cannot reach.

“Saeyoung. Saeyoung, are you even listening?”

V’s death. Anti-Jaehee. The cup. The chair. He’s still laughing--shallow, gasping chuckles. Above him, the ceiling panels are starting a slow, teetering revolution around an invisible axis.

“No. Why would I? I’m not staying here. I don’t even belong here.”

“What are you even saying? You’re not staying here? In the hospital?”

His head shakes even though, technically she isn’t far off. “In this universe.”

Watching the ceiling makes him dizzy. Saeyoung screws his eyes shut and brings his fingertips down hard on his eyelids. Static pinwheels up from black, rippling like space dust caught in a gust of solar wind. Even with his eyes closed, he can still sense the orbiting room pick up speed. Or maybe he’s the one moving. For some reason, he thinks of the ‘black hole’ donation funnel at the National Science Museum planetarium. He thinks of wobbly coins accelerating away from the flared rim, faster and surer until they’re nothing but a flickering line of zinc curving around the vortex.   
  
This universe is wrong. He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t want to stay here.

Space dust is accumulating beneath his shut eyelids but he doesn’t dare open his eyes to blink out the grit and the moisture wicking up his eyelashes. V isn’t dead. He isn’t shelved away in a metal drawer in the hospital morgue with a bullet lodged in his chest. V is a liar and a traitor but he’s _alive._

An image flashes up before he can stop it, some hypoxia-addled memory. It’s ice cream running cold rivulets over his knuckles--blue, too bright to be anything less than artificial, staining and sticky, turning his hands and tongue a different color. Rika’s laughter echoes up into the museum archways.

_“Luciel--here, just use my handkerchief first.”_

There’s a borrowed ₩10 coin in his hand, still warm from V’s pocket and sticky from his own hands. He’s laughing too. It doesn’t feel like a goodbye even though it is. Now that he’s with the agency, who knows when he can sneak out to see Rika and V again.

There’s no air left in his lungs and they’re burning, the moisture is evaporating off them and flash-freezing in his chest. He’s floating, spinning in the vacuum of space and he can’t--he can’t--

He can’t breathe.

Metal coins sucked into the dark. Black holes made out of plastic. He’s orbiting around the funnel rim, pulled towards the gravity well, forces shearing him away ten won at a time to slip through bubbles in quantum foam and appear on the other side of the multiverse.

Something wraps around his fingertips and jerks his hand away from his face. Without the pressure of his fingertips, his eyes open by reflex.

She’s _there_ , bangs mussed, cheeks flushed, chin obscured by the thick red wool plait of her scarf. Undeniably real. Undeniably right. Amber flecks in her eyes glimmer brightly through a sheen of unshed tears like constellations in gold leaf and he wishes he could spend the entire night, lying on his back, gazing up and counting each beautiful fleck. He wishes he could feel the warmth of her hand. He wishes he could banish the tears welling up in her eyes and see her smile. But his wishes are truncated and flat, severed away from feeling and emotion so that they exist more in the realm of abstract theory right along with Petri nets, Chomsky hierarchy, and finite automata.

“Stay. In this universe. Stay here with me.”   
  
She’s right in front of him but she sounds far away--a signal with spotty quality beamed from another orbit. He can barely hear her over the static crackle of interference and when he finally does, the message has an odd, aged quality to it as if time is dilating in the centimeters between them and the words are already centuries old by the time they reach him.

Stay. He can’t. It’s too late. Whatever tethered him to her world has already snapped and now he’s just drifting and disconnected, ephemeral and insubstantial in between universes, there and not there at the same time. Schrodinger’s Saeyoung.

Tears spill up, curving down her cheekbones but she makes no move to duck her head or wipe them away. She doesn’t take her eyes off him and he can’t pull his away from hers even though she’s asking the impossible. Instead, his numb fingers tighten around her hand until he can almost feel it--almost.

She grants half a wish right there and smiles despite the tears still coursing freely to drip off the delicate curve of her jaw. If he could stay for anything, it would be that smile. Breaking eye contact, she examines the loose fringe of her scarf before finding a trailing red thread that she pulls away with her free hand.

Somehow managing not to release his hand, she winds it clumsily around his index finger and gives it a gentle tug to make sure it will stay put. It does. She meets his eyes again.

“You do belong here, for better or worse,” she tells him and this time the words are perfectly clear. Fragments of glowing city skyline dance a dozen brilliant colors in her eyes. “But if you have to leave for a bit, I’ll just make sure you can find your way back.”

She tugs the thread again. “Astronauts always have safety tethers right? This can be yours.”

Something lights across her face and she yanks free another thread from her scarf to tie it around another finger.

“And another one for Saeran. You belong with both of us, so you need two.”

There’s grief bitter bright in her eyes but hope too. He looks down at their clasped hands, at the red threads entangled around his fingers, and feels an echo of the emotion in her eyes fissure up from the dark, numb hollows of his heart. Grief, but hope too.

Her hand is warm.

**Author's Note:**

> Jumin's silver-plated dress collar stays are oddly my favorite headcanon ever. Like, usually dress collar stays are plastic and they snap all the time and I have to go in with tweezers and fish them out of my fiance's shirts. Silver ones are a little overboard haha, but maybe I'll buy him brass ones? My fiance was tickled over my mention of finite automata and wanted to spend ten minutes talking to me about the world of discrete mathematics so that's the last time I'll have him look over my work lol.  
> Thanks so much for reading!


End file.
